Denis Defreyne

Weeknotes 2026 W05: Slightly overhauling

January 26​–​February 1, 2026

Quick bits:

  • I genuinely do not need to see videos of people being gunned down.

  • It’s back to freezing here in Berlin. The ground is covered with a sheet of ice, which makes walking quite the challenge. Berlin is looking at another week of freezing temperatures. This is the longest Berlin winter I’ve had.

    The temperature itself isn’t really the issue. The problem is mostly that getting around is such a pain. And the low, low humidity in my apartment.

  • I’ve decided to give up on Duolingo. If I want to learn a language properly, this isn’t the way to go.

  • I’ve finally started using Tarmak-4. After this, there is only a single step left, which will bring me to Cylemak Colemak. It’s just around the corner!

Shower thoughts:

  • Why is it subscription (with a p) and subscribe (with a b) instead of subscribtion or subscripe?

  • Why are there movie credits but not movie debits?

  • Why don’t pear and fear rhyme? Oh, how much fun it’d be to say fearpear. But the lack of rhyme RUINS IT.

Gremlins:

  • The microphone and camera of my work laptop occasionally stop working. There’s no indication in Google Meet; other people have reported that they can’t hear me, nor see me. The only workaround is closing and reopening the Chrome window.

    It’s particularly annoying that I have no way of telling whether the microphone and camera are working; from my side, everything looks and sounds fine.1

  • My laptop started randomly going to sleep while I’m actively using it. It does this 3–4 times in a row and then starts working normally again.

  • I cannot create a work Apple ID because the account creation form is broken; the Network tab shows a HTTP 400 Bad Request response, indicating that I didn’t fill out the city field. But there is no city field on the account creation form!

  • Meeting notifications stopped working. I’m so used to broken notifications that I instinctively keep an eye on my calendar.

I’ve been slightly overhauling the Nanoc web site. The changes, for now, are subtle:

  • The layout no longer uses fixed elements (position: fixed) which gives the design a lot more breathing room. I felt that it was too cramped before.

  • The number of distinct colors is reduced, which creates a bit more of a consistent tone.

  • The font size is now a bit larger, and matches the browser default (16px).

From an implementation point of view, things have improved too:

  • Sass is out; it’s pure CSS now. This, to my surprise, decreased the number of source lines of code.

  • Just like with my own web site, I’ve adopted CSS layers. Not having to worry about specificity and !important is great.

  • I’ve also started using CSS grid in places. It simplifies the code and makes layouts considerably easier to reason about.

  • I’ve introduced CSS variables for colors (e.g. --color-link-fg) and sizes (e.g. --size-3).

I am surprised by how old the Nanoc web site’s approach to CSS was. I’ve not only become a better designer, but also a better front-end developer — and of course CSS has become much more powerful.

More changes are coming, both purely technical as well as visual. The purely technical changes are needed to be able to iterate quickly; to try things out to see whether they’re sensible.

I’ll have to think about the information architecture of the site. (Oh what a fancy word!) I might need to do some brainstorming and industrial espionage research to see how other software product sites are organized, and what I can learn from them.

As for the homepage… I’m not sure what to do just yet. Home pages are, in my experience, always by far the toughest to design. What I know for sure is that I want to not have it “sell” Nanoc anymore: remove the slideshow and the fancy marketing copy, and instead adopt something more direct and transparent — Nanoc is not for everyone, and it’s important to be honest about that.

In any case, it’s nice to once again have two sites to actively work on and improve. I’ve been neglecting the Nanoc web site for too long.

Nanoc isn’t going anywhere for the foreseeable future,2 so I might as well make it, along with its web site and documentation, as good as I can make it.

I found N. K. Jemisin’s Carving a New World (2011) to be particularly insightful. Three points stood out:

5. Then I write a first chapter. It doesn’t really matter that I have no plot at this stage; basically what I’m trying to get a feel for is the viewpoint character and voice of the story.

I’ve never started writing a chapter until I’ve had a good idea of what I wanted to be in it. I fear wasting time; writing an entire chapter feels like a lot of work that might not pay off. But Jemisin goes further:

6. I write the first chapter again, usually from a different character’s PoV or in a different person/tense, or with a different style. I keep writing first chapters, in fact, until I find one that feels right.

I suppose this fits in the “kill your darlings” advice — but damn is it still hard to throw something out.

7. I don’t always do this, but sometimes I’ll write a short story set in that universe to try and solidify my ideas. […]

That’s the only thing I’ve been doing somewhat successfully. Writing anything larger than a short story is terribly intimidating.

What I’m taking away from all this, is that writing needs time, and a lot of it. Patience, too. There needs to be time for exploration. Time to get dreamy.

Entertainment:

  • TR-49 is a parody of my filing schema. I have no choice but to take this as a personal insult. Jon Ingold, we are enemies now. Anyway — five stars.

  • I had entirely forgotten that I was playing the Valley of Memory DLC of Assassin’s Creed Mirage3 until I was watching a YouTube review that looked oddly familiar.4 Anyway, the DLC’s finished now.

Links:

Tech links:

  1. This is probably not true, but… maybe what I need is a new camera! How fortunate that I was planning on getting one anyway. Do you think I could get my employer to expense a fancy mirrorless camera?! ↩︎

  2. I’m aiming to be able to say that Nanoc is a quarter of a century old. We’re not quite there yet, though! ↩︎

  3. Assassin’s Creed Mirage (Ubisoft Bordeaux, 2023), published by Ubisoft. ↩︎

  4. The irony of forgetting “Valley of Memory” is not lost on me. ↩︎

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